Movies

Duane Dudek | On Film

Critic's Rating: 4 stars

'Amour' a powerful tale of love measured through loss

Reuters

Emmauelle Riva (right) and Jean-Louis Trintignant star in "Amour," a French-language drama of love measured through loss. Trintignant plays a husband caring for his terminally ill wife, played by Riva.

"Amour," whose five Oscar nominations include best picture, best foreign-language film and best original screenplay, is a cruelly, but profoundly intimate portrait of two lives - caregiver husband, terminally ill wife - intertwined.

Death is the absence of life, and Oscar-nominated writer-director Michael Haneke captures the essence of absence in the slow and incremental disappearance of things, big and small, that are important to the characters, including mobility, privacy and dignity.

His invisible hand strips away the manipulative and melodramatic elements applied to similar stories by those afraid to look death in the eye, until all that remains are two people in a room together facing the dark.

Haneke's stark and mundane aesthetic causes us to imagine their lives for ourselves and to watch them decorate their light-filled apartment with art and music in our minds.

The narrative unfolds as a series of episodic vignettes that collectively and ultimately lead to a predetermined place, but each of which tells a story itself.

Best actress nominee Emmanuelle Riva - who turns 86 the day of the Oscars - plays a former piano teacher, and the film opens at the concert by one of her former students.

After the concert, she and her husband, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, return to their spacious, colorfully lived-in apartment and exchange chitchat about the night.

The wife's silent stroke the next morning could be mistaken for her daydreaming. Rather, it is the muted announcement of a lingering and debilitating illness whose arrival will, over time, leave her dependent, bedridden and delirious.

The woman the husband knew is gone, and she has taken their life with her.

And neither his gentleness and loving intent in feeding her, helping her in the bathroom, stroking her hand until she is asleep or putting her through rehab exercises - nor the unwelcome, but well-meaning interference of their daughter, played by Isabelle Huppert - can forestall the sad, mean and ugly reality that is slowly advancing death.

"Amour" measures love through loss. And rarely has the duty, devotion and sacrifice that true love requires been portrayed so unflinchingly as in this story of people crossing the finish line with the title of the film intact.

In a strange coincidence, this is one of three films about aging opening in Milwaukee Friday. But you don't have to be a senior citizen to be moved by "Amour."

Death, illness and tragedy transcend demographics, and the characters in "Amour" are all of us in the end.

Email: ddudek@journalsentinel.com

Keep up with the Oscars and the rest of the movie world on film critic Duane Dudek's blog, The Dudek Abides.